1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to content management, and more particularly, to managing content by shadowing live contents with multiple views of content.
2. General Background
There are many internet and intranet sites in existence today serving pages of information to a multitude of users throughout the world. These sites rely on a variety of data sources, some providing fixed or static content, others providing dynamic content and typically hybrid sites serving a combination of static and dynamic content. As users seek more information in more efficient and easy to access forms the need for delivering that information places a series of complex demands on the underlying site.
Users expect information to be provided to them in a tailored manner by the sites they visit. These expectations requires the site providers to provide means to customize information to meet the users needs. This customization introduces complexity into the site creation, maintenance and management. In addition to the complexity of handling large amounts of data the site must also be maintained in a current state, yielding timely information to users requests.
In current sites, the application of changes to the production system may cause destructive changes to the site contents. This type of change replaces previous material with the new material and provides no mechanism for fallback. Errors created as a result of this process are immediately viewed by users of the site.
Site development may be able to segment the files used to create the look and feel of the site and assign responsibilities of updating such files to specific individuals. When the files have been updated a collection must be made to aggregate the changed files and perform some form of integration build to combine the files into a complete site. The integration result is not a granular entity in that approvers must look at the full site view to see changes. Many times this is more than an approver wants to deal with and may have difficulty is seeing the change.
Complexity of a site may make it difficult or impossible to overlay multiple layers of change onto the production system to enable a review. This scenario would force approval of a series of changes to be late in the process cycle adding risk to the change implementation. This complexity may also mean difficulty in establishment a duplicate of the production environment due to resource constraints and file management issues. The duplicate of the production site would be used for testing prior to releasing the new content or changed content into production.
Some content managers used by sites provide organization change recommendations based on frequency of use, providing information used to relocate files for faster access. These types of content managers can be considered as post production tools and do not provide assistance in the creation and review of site material. Such content managers are useful for tuning sites after they have been in production for a period of time.
Other types of content management may be used for analyzing and categorizing content after creation. Again these managers provide a useful service but offer nothing related to the creation and approval of content prior to production mode.
Some site content managers define a whole environment and require the use of special tags and conditional processing unique to that environment. The environment may also require a special interpreter, parser, cache mechanism, or user interface component, essentially specialized tools adapted for the environment. Additional requirements may constrain the implementation to the use of a proprietary relational database for parts management and containment.
An improvement in the content management means implemented in a web site is required to provide an enhanced means of introducing and managing changed content into productive use. An improved content management means is required to support both files and databases as information sources and should hide such underlying implementations from the site itself. A mechanism is required to overcome destruction of production content that may occur when new material is being provided for approval prior to production usage. Approvers need an efficient means to review changes they have requested and to not be hindered by other change activity on the site.